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The late summer and fall of 1984 changed my life forever. A child was conceived. A child was aborted. My future husband was wounded in ways he didn’t begin to understand at the time. I was crushed. And it wasn’t even my child. My husband and I began dating in the spring of 1984 after knowing one another for about a year and a half. I knew he had been married before, but his ex-wife had had several affairs during their marriage, and she eventually left him. They remained friendly, however... Many weeks later, Paul told me that his ex was pregnant and was going to have an abortion.... At the time, I knew nothing about fetal development, but I was still deeply disturbed by the idea of abortion... When she called again saying that the doctor thought she was in her second trimester, I was truly horrified. Even in my ignorance, I knew that a second-trimester abortion was really bad news... Shortly after she aborted, I was at home channel surfing and trying to block the abortion from my mind. I think my television only got four channels, but as fate would have it, I stumbled on a segment of an investigative news program that caught my attention. The host was holding something in his hand and said, “Well, this is what all the arguing is about.” The camera then zoomed in on a jar holding a small fetus. And my world turned upside down. I was stunned that the tiny first-trimester human was so perfectly formed... I didn’t know if the fetal child had a soul. I didn’t know if any of us had souls. I feared this life might be all there is. And that made it all the more unbearable for me. As I shared what I learned with Paul, I could see that he was distressed, although he would often argue with me about the significance of what we were learning... about a year after the abortion, Paul confessed that he had spent the night with his ex... a sonogram before the abortion confirmed that he was the baby’s father, based on the gestational age of the fetus. There are really no words to describe the pain I felt... That night they spent together and the resulting dead child bound them together in an obscene perversion of their natural, God-intended role as parents, and it poisoned our marriage... Click here to read this story in its entirety.

Age: 50
Location: Southern California
Date Submitted: May 19, 2012